Dow's engineers came up with a design calling for three plastic parts to do the same work as the 153 metal parts in the traditional mower.

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The button layout follows the Windows Phone template -- there's the trio of capacitive buttons below the screen, with three physical plastic buttons along the right edge.

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The machines aren't the humanoid contraptions many people conjure when they think of robots Lipson's robots consist of a stack of three white plastic cubes that stand as a simple tower.

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